Splintered Love
by Irrevocable Truth
Summary: Rejection, Mikan decides, is the only way out.


**Splintered Love**

By: Irrevocable Truth

**. **

**Rejection, Mikan decides, is the only way out.**

**.**

**S**he stopped and put her pen down, leaning back and staring at the ceiling for a moment. Her emotions were stirring again, bringing her back to those days she had long been trying to forget. Mikan Sakura opened her desk drawer, her hand scrambling through the pile of papers, looking for the letter with the nervously scrawled handwriting and the rose embossed in the lower right corner.

When she found it her eyes began to instinctively scan through the content of the letter she had read far too many times. She had taken the time to study the little details of the letter, down to how his Ns were written in different strokes, depending on the mood of the statement it was in. She had memorized it even to the tiny blots of ink here and there where the pen refused to cooperate. _Dear Mikan_ written, and then erased, replaced with a less cheesy greeting of _To Mikan_.

She smiled at the familiar memory of the guy she loved.

**.**

"**M**ikan!" he called, his voice etched with a tinge of anxiety and fear.

She turned around, flashing him a panicky smile. Unconsciously, she'd been avoiding him for the whole day. When he had said, "I need to tell you something tomorrow" over the phone last night, her heart had skipped a beat. With a rather raspy voice –as if there was a hairball waiting to be coughed out— she replied with a quick, "Sure."

She hung up the phone that night and sighed. She was anxious, yes, and she wondered whether it would be too eager of her if she suddenly ran over to his dorm room, knocked, and spat out all the thoughts that were racing through her head right then and there. Had she done something wrong? Was he mad, perhaps, for some reason?

The call had come at around 8:00 PM. It was around 12:31 exactly –after 4 contemplative hours of anguish— that it finally hit the brunette, as she lay there in her bed.

_He was going to tell her about his feelings._

The realization had instilled a rather urgent dread inside her, and her survival instincts told her to get away from him as much as possible. And that was what she did; except now she couldn't run away.

**.**

**S**he had started to notice it during Math class one rainy July.

She was staring out the window, because she hated the teacher and the subject and the gloomy, cloudy day. She heard the light tap of a pencil on a desk, so she turned around to look.

He was scribbling something in his notebook, she figured, as he ran his hand through his hair and rubbed the back of his neck. He sighed, defeated, and reclined back on his chair. She was afraid it might flop over, unable to carry his weight (not that he was fat), leaving him sprawled on the floor; but it didn't, and after rocking on his seat he sighed again, this time louder, loud enough so that the whole class noticed and turned their heads to look.

Their 31-year-old teacher looked at him curiously. "Is there a problem, Mr. Nogi?"

"No, sir," he said, the tips of his ears already burning red. "No problem at all, sir."

"Would you mind sharing your thoughts, then?"

He looked down at his shoes, with their shoelaces tied into a strange sort of ribbon that Mikan didn't usually see. "I was just, uhm, thinking about how the slope of a line seems, uh, real cool. Sir."

The teacher looked unconvinced, but decided to shrug it off with a question. "Remind the class, then, Ruka, what the general form of the equation of a line is."

He twitched, and she was worried he might not know the answer and have to go to detention. But he stood up, not proudly or boastfully, but respectfully, like you're supposed to when you're called for recitation by a teacher, and he answered. It was a whisper at first, but the volume gradually increased.

Their instructor seemed to be satisfied, and turned back to the blackboard, and she looked and saw that he had started drawing a graph with points and their coordinates and things that Mikan could not understand.

There was no special event that day that magically revealed his feelings to her. No clumsiness that makes her fall and kiss his lips, no random proclamation of "I love you!" in the middle of class.

It was simply when their eyes met that gave it all away.

She turned to look at him again, and when she did, she found that he was already looking, and their gazes collided. That was all it took, and suddenly she knew.

**.**

**A**t first she decided that she didn't want to assume. It would only lead to awkward conversations and unnecessary shiftiness in both parties, and she didn't want any of that. So she settled for keeping quiet about the moment, pretending it had never occurred in the first place.

But then came more signs. Borrowing a pencil when he had one so obviously stuck in the back pocket of his school pants. Asking help for a Science question about cellulose and plants that she was pretty sure he had been able to answer when the teacher asked a question about it four days ago. Treating her to coffee that day they'd accidentally bumped into each other at the mall. So many small, insignificant details, until one day they'd piled up and she realized what this was all pointing to.

And then came the eight o'clock call.

**.**

**S**he didn't want to talk to him.

She could anticipate the flow of the conversation, the way she'd have to reject him, the look of brokenness in his eyes, the compulsion she'd get to reach out and kiss all that brokenness away.

Because she honestly hadn't meant to fall for him.

Her best friend was _in love_ with him. She knew it, he knew it, everyone did, and on that rainy day in July she had spent countless hours swearing to herself she wouldn't fall for him, no matter what he did. She wouldn't swoon if he happened to give her a balloon for her birthday; she wouldn't jump for joy if he happened to give her peonies on Valentine's; she wouldn't open up her heart and let him in even if he happened to smile at her with all the sincerity and attention in the world. She had replayed all the possible ways to win her over and mentally noted _never _to fall for it if it was Ruka Nogi.

But he didn't have to resort to any of that.

He was just Ruka Nogi, always and all the time, and she hadn't expected she'd fall even harder for that than at any attempt to woo her with all of the above ways.

Hotaru Imai... she'd understand. If Mikan had decided she wanted Ruka for herself, Hotaru Imai would've understood, even though she was deathly in love with Nogi. She would get over it, because she loved them both too much to deter them from getting what made them happy.

But it was this very selfless love that was preventing Mikan from getting too close to him, because she knew Hotaru would be okay on the outside, she would cheer them on and give them her best wishes, but she would crumple up and wither inside, because Hotaru's still human, and humans get hurt.

**.**

**H**e looked away. "Why?" he whispered.

"I—" She stopped.

He turned around to look at her again, to see why she hadn't finished her sentence, only to find her crying. She wasn't sobbing into a handkerchief; she was just crying, with the fresh stream of tears cascading down her cheeks silently, her eyes trembling and her lips pressed tight together in an effort to suppress the emotions.

"I'm sorry, Mikan, I didn't mean to..." Ruka stuttered. "I just thought...with the way things were going between us I—I don't—I don't even know anymore, Mikan. I just—I'm sorry. Please, just forget...just forget about everything I've said so far, okay?" He ran his thumb across her cheek to wipe away the tears. "Come on, let's get you home." He was about to stand up when she reached out to hold his hand.

His eyes widened, staring at her, uncomprehending.

Swiftly, she had placed her lips against his in a chaste kiss, nothing more than a slight pressure between two orbicularis oris muscles, before she moved away again.

"What—" Ruka started.

"I'm sorry."

He stayed silent for a while, then sighed. "Okay." He closed his eyes. "I understand. Just—we'll still be friends, right?"

She looked up to meet his eyes. A piercing sting in both of their hearts, the kind of pain from knowing the chance to be irrevocably happy is within your grasp, but not being able to reach out and get it because you're holding something you love, and you don't want to let it go.

"Of course."

He smiled at her, like this wasn't all her fault, like things would be fine between them again, like the gap that had started to determine that they would never be "just friends" again didn't exist.

He pulled her into a tight embrace.

"Ruka, what are you—"

"Just one last time, Mikan."

They stood there, in the middle of the city square, arms wrapped around each other, their heartbeats trying to slow down from the infinite number of possibilities that could have been and should have been _if only_.

"I'm sorry," she breathed.

"It's fine," he answered, deep down knowing it wasn't fine at all. "I'll walk you home."

And when they let go of the embrace, they had simultaneously let each other go as well.

**.**

******.**  


**Author's Note: **As I was cleaning up files, I stumbled upon a few stories I'd started last summer but never quite finished. I scrapped around five or six of them, but this one was halfway through already, so I decided I'd just continue it without really knowing where it was supposed to end up. I know, it's not really very good, and the title is a total failure, but... haha, happy holidays?


End file.
